Assessing News Media Influences on the Formation of Whites' Racial Policy Preferences

<jats:p> Researchers have shown that news discourse contains images, episodes, themes, and vocabulary that comprise a negative portrayal of Blacks. But evidence linking news media content to Whites' racial policy opinions has lacked clear specification of the opinion formation process and mechanisms of news media influences on such process. This study mimics Whites' reasoning process via a causal model involving ideological orientations, affect toward Blacks, assessment of situations of racial inequality, and causal attributions of the inequality. The characteristics of this reasoning process may be affected by the news media in several ways. By analyzing the National Election Study (NES) 1990 Post-Election Survey data, this study examines how Whites' reliance on ideological principles or affect in forming their opinions is contingent on news media exposure. The data show that increased information-oriented media use enhances the role of ideological orientation and, possibly, causal attributions in Whites' racial policy reasoning. </jats:p>